Matilda -, Canto 28. 1859. Oil on canvas. 20¼ x 36½ in. (51.4 x 92.7 cm.). Private collection, ex-Sotheby's. When this painting, sometimes referred to under the erroneous title Dante's Leah, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860, no. 578, these lines were included in the exhibition catalogue: "For thou, Lord, hast made me glad through thy work; I will triumph in the works of thy hands" - Psalm XCII, 4. [Click on the images on this page to enlarge them.]

Leslie has depicted Matilda kneeling on the ground and gathering wildflowers in a beautiful landscape. She is clad in a medieval gown of blue and white and with a pink cloak. She is watched in the background to the left by Dante, Virgil, and Statius. This was one of two pictures, both similar in conception, which Leslie exhibited at the Royal Academy that year. The other was entitled Meditation, no. 588, and like Matilda was accompanied in the catalogue by a quotation from one of the Psalms, in this case Psalm XCIV. The well-known collector John Hamilton Trist bought Matilda directly from the artist. When the painting came up for auction in 2003 John Christian explained its context:

The painting illustrates Dante's Purgatorio, Canto 28, in which the poet, accompanied by Virgil and Statius, penetrates the Garden of Eden and encounters

A lady, wandering through the wood alone,
Singing and culling flower after flower,
Wherewith her pathway was all painted o'er.

In Canto 33 the lady is given the name of Matelda [sic], and she is usually identified as Matilda, Countess of Tuscany (1046-1115), a great heiress of the house of Canossa who was renowned for her fortitude in the face of many adversities. In Dante's poem she represents the Active and Beatrice the Contemplative Life. [120]

Closer views. Left: The highly detailed tree trunk and vegetation, with the figures in the background. Right: Matilda plucking May-blooms.

Christian went on to discuss how the Pre-Raphaelites influenced this early work by Leslie:

He began to exhibit at the R.A. in 1857, and for a few years was profoundly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites. Matilda, which was exhibited in 1860, when the artist was twenty-five, is an outstanding example. Rich in meticulously-handled naturalistic detail inspired by Dante's graphic account of the Garden of Eden, it is almost a textbook illustration of Pre-Raphaelite and Ruskinian principles…Dante's Vision of Matilda gathering Flowers had also been the subject of a watercolour by D.G. Rossetti, executed for Ruskin in 1855. The watercolour itself is lost, but a related pen-and-ink drawing exists in the Ashmolean Museum. This was the moment when Ruskin was still a passionate admirer of Rossetti's work, and was encouraging him to illustrate the poet whom he regarded as 'the great prophetic exponent of the heart of the Middle Ages'. Matilda gathering Flowers was one of seven watercolours based on the Purgatorio that he commissioned from Rossetti, and was a pair to a subject from Canto 27, Dante's Vision of Rachel and Leah, now in the Tate Gallery.

It would be interesting to know if Leslie was aware of these watercolours by Rossetti and if they inspired him to tackle the Matilda subject himself. It seems highly likely since Ruskin was on close terms with the Leslie family, and had already praised earlier works by George in Academy Notes. Moreover, although the composition of Leslie's picture has little in common with Rossetti's corresponding design, Leslie shows Dante, Virgil and Statius standing in the distance contemplating Matilda in much the same way that Rossetti had shown Dante watching the two girls in his Rachel and Leah. [120]

F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum found the landscape background charming: "Mr. G.D. Leslie's Matilda – 'Dante, Purg.' c.28 (578). Matilda plucking May-blooms in a pleasant wilderness shows some delicate, but rather missal-like, execution of a charming landscape it has for background" (726). Tom Taylor the art critic for The Times felt that both paintings Leslie showed augured well for his future success: "Two figures by Mr. G.D. Leslie - one called Matilda from Dante's Purgatorio, a lady reclining [sic] in a green garden on the edge of a pool starred with water lilies; the other a meditative figure in a similar landscape - without the water - show at once a power of faithful landscape painting and a thoughtful and graceful feeling for female form and character, which promise well for this young painter's future. The fault of both pictures is a want of keeping between landscape and figures, and a certain rawness and over-emphasis, the result of honest painstaking not yet matured by study and practice" (11).

The painting as it appeared in a wood engraving, mistakenly identified as Dante's Leah, in the Magazine of Art in 1883 (VI: 66), when still in the collection of J. H. Trist.

As George P. Landow noted in an earlier version of this page, Cosmo Monkhouse, writing in The Magazine of Art in 1883 thought Leslie's Matilda and Arthur Hughes' Silver and Gold "come nearer to what the public reckons as Pre-Raphaelite, than any other of the works we print; for they are 'purist' in feeling and filled with almost infinite detail of grass and leaf and flower." Monkhouse continued,

Much as we admire Mr. Leslie's later work, which has kept before us constant visions of the unsophisticated elegance of English girls, there is enough intellectual effort and manual labour in his Leah (exhibited in 1860) to make half a dozen of his Celia's and Pollies. If the Pre Raphaelite movement did nothing else, it at least strung up the energies of our young painters to put into their pictures not only all they knew, but whatever they could think and feel. [69]

Bibliography

Bate, Percy. The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters. London: George Bell and Sons, 1899, 90.

Christian, John. "British Pictures 1500-1850 & Victorian Pictures." London: Christies (10 June 2003): lot 103, 118-121.

Monkhouse, Cosmo: "A Pre-Raphaelite Collection." The Magazine of Art VI (1883): 66 and 69.

Stephens, Frederic George. "Fine Arts. Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 1700 (26 May 1860): 724-27.

Taylor, Tom. "The Royal Academy." The Times (17 May 1860): 11.


Created 8 August 2023